Performance Now

QUT Art Museum

Brisbane

6 December 2014 – 1 March 2015

The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...

Showcasing performance works made since 2000, ‘Performance Now’ was curated by RoseLee Goldberg, a renowned authority on performance art history and author of the influential Performance Art, From Futurism to the Present (1979). On entering the exhibition one’s expectations were unsettled by the dominance of screen based art — in many ways this could have been mistaken for a video art show.

Without doubt, the key attractor to the exhibition was the chance to see work by the acclaimed grandmother of performance art, Marina Abramović, who has been pivotal in bringing about a resurgence of interest in the form. Ironically titled, Seven Easy Pieces (2005), Abramović’s work is presented in the form of video documents on seven screens in a semi-circle. In a typically unforgiving and tortuous endurance, Abramović performed a gruelling seven hours per day, over seven consecutive days at the Guggenheim Museum. Her works re-enacted six seminal works from the 1960s and 1970s: Bruce Nauman (Body Pressure, 1974), Vito Acconci (Seedbed, 1972), Valie Export (Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969), Gina Pane (The Conditioning, 1973), Joseph Beuys (How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965), and her own work, Lips of Thomas (1975). The seventh and final work was her newest performance work, Entering the Other Side (2005). The re-enactment of these raw and highly provocative pieces not only tests the artist’s own will and endurance, but recontexualises the works — onto a female body, in an established art museum, as prolonged endurance pieces and outside of the cultural and political structures from which the works originated.

A large body of the performance art generated in the 1960s

Clifford Owens, Anthology (Nsenga Knight), 2011. Two digital prints. Courtesy of On Stellar Rays. Collection for Sharing and Learning.

Marina Abramović, Seven easy pieces, 2005. Seven screen installation, colour, sound. 7hrs. Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelley Gallery, New York.